1.06.2014

made for happiness...Thoreau's Journal: 06-Jan-1857

A man asked me the other night whether such and such persons were not as happy as anybody, being conscious, as I perceived, of such unhappiness himself and not aspiring to much more than an animal content. “Why!” said I, speaking to his condition, “the stones are happy. Concord River is happy, and I am happy too. When I took up a fragment of a walnut-shell this morning, I saw by its very grain and composition, the form and color, etc., that it was made for happiness. The most brutish and inanimate objects that are made suggest an everlasting and thorough satisfaction; they are the homes of content. Wood, earth, mould, etc., exist for joy. Do you think that Concord River would have continued to flow these millions of years by Clamshell Hill and round Hunt’s Island, if it had not been happy,—if it had been miserable in its channel, tired of existence, and cursing its maker and the hour that it sprang?”

4 comments:

Here, in this little nugget of a journal entry, is the very essence of Thoreau and, I daresay, the problem with those who don't follow his thinking. 'Bloom where you're planted' is the newest phrase to join the lot, but the message is the same: thrive where you are, given any form or color or lot. If we could only see - on a regular basis - the happiness Thoreau saw in his world, there would be less discontentment. It's so simple that it's hard to understand. Just brilliant.

Thoreau wasn't just a naturalist, he was a poet of sorts. There are things that literature knows that science can't grasp. Try to read a novel with the scientific method. Go to an art museum and try to understand Winslow Homer with math, logic, chemistry or biology. Can't be done. The medieval thinkers were no slouches as well.

"Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice the yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works.

Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.

The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter.

To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi."

unediting thoreau

complete journals at walden woods

on-line Journal Transcripts

from Davidson Library UCSB

HDT Journals Political

from The Picket Line

An Annotated Walden

from The Thoreau Reader

the simple print

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau and its volume compilation is copyright 2004-2011 Greg Perry.

The text is from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906).

Each blog post is an excerpt from that day's entry in the Journal, and although not necessarily the complete entry, it is an integral and intact section thereof.

"It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own.... One must submit abjectly to such a guide, and the reward was great." -Emerson

.

Henry's Companions

Walden Eye in the Sky

Walking with Henry

one of the native forces

“Thoreau was a surprising fellow—he is not easily grasped—is elusive: yet he is one of the native forces—stands for a fact, a movement, an upheaval: Thoreau belongs to America, to the transcendental, to the protesters: then he is an outdoor man: all outdoor men everything else being equal appeal to me. Thoreau was not so precious, tender, a personality as Emerson: but he was a force—he looms up bigger and bigger: his dying does not seem to have hurt him a bit: every year has added to his fame.”